25143 Itokawa is a small, peanut-shaped near-Earth asteroid of the Apollo group, discovered by the LINEAR survey in 1998 and later named for the Japanese rocket engineer Hideo Itokawa. It measures roughly 330 meters across its longest dimension and completes one rotation every 12.1 hours. Its low density and highly porous structure mark it as a rubble pile, a body held together loosely by numerous boulders of different sizes rather than forming one solid mass, and it is classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid because its orbit brings it close to Earth.
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